This morning I commented on how remarkable it was to see the daughter of the victim of a terrorist attack chide racists for attributing collective responsibility to all Somalis because of the crime committed by the Somalis who had just murdered her father.

She didn’t but I called the people who think like this, stupid.

And of course, right on cue, Jean Claude Micallef steps in.

This post is from around the same time I wrote my blog post of this morning. Facebook is a bit imprecise about the time a post goes up so I don’t know if he was actually writing this shit after he read my blog and was reacting to it. But I flatter myself, or perhaps him, if I were to think that Jean Claude Micallef reads … my blog.

The last time I commented about something Jean Claude Micallef said on his Facebook he took offence because I called him a hypocrite. He dragged me through the libel court saying that I was misinterpreting the intention of his post and that it was cruel of me to speak in a way that could have cost him his job.

The context was the immediate aftermath of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s killing and because of something stupid he said about that, I pointed out that the issue is not just that he said it. Nor that he is a B-rate politician of the Labour Party.

The issue I underlined was that he is a broadcaster on national TV and that any self-respecting broadcaster in the world, not to mention a State broadcaster, would have fired his ass on the spot when making these sort of remarks.

I then had to explain in court that there are rules of ethics governing public broadcasters, believe it or not even Malta’s broadcaster. And that just because tagħnalkollers like Jean Claude Micallef behave like they’re governed by no rules, does not mean the rules do not exist and it is not our duty to point them out to him even as he flouts them.

So here we go again. Any public broadcaster in the civilised world, whose presenter graces its screens on a daily basis and posts on social media a flatly racist comment like Jean Claude Micallef’s was today would be fired before sundown.

Jean Claude Micallef today attributed collective guilt for a crime committed by a terrorist group to the entire nationality that group comes from. He exhorted punishment for people that are clearly unconnected to the crime. He encouraged the Maltese government to punish without trial Somali people living in Malta for a crime other Somalis committed just shy of 5,000 km away in Mogadishu. He argued for retaliation on innocent people, some of whom are actually directly or indirectly victims of the same organisation that committed the crime that provoked his post.

I called Jean Claude Micallef a hypocrite in 2017 and he dragged me to court for it.

Let’s see what he does now that I call him a racist. I don’t call him a ‘stupid racist’ because that suggests there’s any other type. But he sure is stupid as well.